The Age of Kali: Travels and Encounters in India

‘Harrison had a huge moustache which he used to wax,’ remembers Saeed, ‘and he also had a talking parrot which used to say things like, “Rise and shine, rise and shine” – you know, the usual public school nonsense. Chaufin, a friend of mine in school who hated Waxy for a variety of very valid reasons, used to get up in the morning at five o’clock and tried teaching the parrot to say, “Waxy is a bastard, Waxy is a bastard.”

‘He did this with such an absolute sense of dedication and purpose that in a year’s time the parrot picked up the line, and every time Waxy walked past he’d squawk, “Waxy is a bastard, Waxy is a bastard.”

‘Now, Waxy thought this was a joke, but then one day he was taking Doutre, the headmaster, on a tour of all the wonderful things he was doing to the dormitories, and as he walked past the parrot recited the famous line. So the story had a very macabre ending, because Waxy in his temper twisted the neck of the parrot; and that was the end of Waxy’s parrot.’

On the surface, little appears to have changed at La Martiniere since Saeed left thirty years ago. Now, as then, boys of all religions still attend chapel every day, listening to a choir made up of Muslims and Hindus dressed in white surplices sing the ‘Te Deum’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’. The masters still wear black academic gowns, the curriculum and uniform remain firmly those of the English public school of the 1930s, and khaki drill, cricket, the works of John Buchan and furtive schoolboy homosexuality are apparently all still very much de rigueur. Urdu or Hindi literature is never taught; instead pupils still learn by heart great swathes of Wordsworth, Tennyson and Byron.

One morning, after the boarders had attended chapel and the whole school had massed at assembly to sing the school hymn, ‘Bright Renown’, I talked to some of the boys who were doing their prep in the spectacular Moghul-Gothic school library. At the rear of the room, the form mistress, Mrs Faridi (who earlier in the morning had doubled up as organist on the old manually-pumped organ in the chapel), was looking around her, scowling through her hornrims and shouting out: ‘Settle down now, boys! Settle down!’

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